Pimp my £1k lightroom build?

Associate
Joined
24 Sep 2003
Posts
538
Location
Macclesfield UK
Hi all,

Considering the following spec for a Lightroom PC and odd bits of video editing, for a possible future Mavic Air purchase. No gaming intended and roughly £1k budget, plus a copy of Win10. Will be linked up to a 4K Dell IPS monitor and 6TB NAS backup I already have. Current thoughts are as below for these reasons:

- Best value of Ryzen CPU and GPU vs performance
- Not sure the X570 or B550 boards gives me anything more at the moment (assuming there's an upgrade path on the chosen board to a Ryzen 4th gen at some point in a few years...) - PCI3.0 M.2 drive should be more than fast enough for intended use
- OS etc would sit on the M2, with images etc on the 1TB SSD as the working disk. I also have a 128GB EVO840 that'll hold the LR catalogue and cache.
- Case tbc


My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £973.90 (includes shipping: £11.10)​

Question though - if I could throw, say, an extra £150 at the build what would be best benefit for intended use?

- Ryzen 3700x with 2 extra cores?
- Extra 16GB RAM?
- GPU upgrade to 5700x? (Plus higher wattage PSU)

I can see pros and cons to all the above options - there's a law of diminishing returns on each one - LR generally plays better with NVidea vs AMD GPUs but the 5700x is about 25-30% faster on straight benchmarks, the extra 2 CPU cores may be of benefit, and my current i5-3470k/R7 250/16GB system does top out on RAM on occasion at 16GB so 32GB might help out there.

Any LR users out there with any helpful advice on which would give most return on the extra outlay, and if the difference would really be that noticeable for any of the three options?
 
That's some interesting thoughts - One of the ideas for the 2 drives in LR seems to like having cache/catalogue and images on different drives, but given the speed of the M2 that's worth a think.

I was also pondering RAM speed - I see a lot of chatter around DDR4 3600 CAS18 for anything above the Ryzen 5s and wondered if it really would make that much difference.

The non-X 3900 seems to be a bit scarce - need to look into that one. And i'll go look at the Sabrent drive - again, not one I'd heard of, but reviews look attractive.
 
Guessing that bundle was about £500 including stock cooler, if I’m seeing the right thing? Looks appealing, as the MSI carbon board is worth the extra £10 - the 5v headers on that board would be useful as I may get persuaded to put ARGB in the case....
 
OK, I'll look a little harder, unless you could PM me with some thoughts on where to look?
 
at £130 for b450 i'd rather wait and pre=oorde a better B550 board

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...ntel-Core-10th-Gen-vs-AMD-Ryzen-3rd-Gen-1761/

OK, help me out here, please - what does the B550 give me for the £50+ extra, for the intended build that the B450 doesn't? I'm aware of the M2 from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0 but, to be honest, an M2 PCIe 3.0 is more than quick enough, realistically and I'm not going to be getting 4000 MHz RAM and wasn't likely to hang on until the next gen Ryzens appear.

I don't usually overclock CPU or RAM, and tend not to upgrade any more frequently than 5-6 years at a time... And are there any concerns around early adoption of these 1st tranche boards, in terms of working out which ones are decent and which are now, given all the prior debate about, for example, MSI vs Asus on the B450s and x570s (as I understood it, there were plusses and minuses around voltage management from different manufacturers, but please do correct me if I got that wrong?)
 
OK, that makes sense - thanks for clarifying. Guess it's too early to know which of the new B550 boards is best to go for just yet, in terms of which vendor has the best implementations?
 
The appeal of the bundle with the 3900 (non-X) and the B450 Tomahawk MAX is that the board works out sub £90, if using the CPU price of £350. If you are looking at B550 then add another £50 to be at the Asus B550 TUF Gaming. I suppose it's not a huge amount, but we were working to a budget to start off with as usual :D

Agree - the budget is fairly controlled, so the 3900/Toma for ca £440 is appealing if still available, and I think the board does all I need it to do for the foreseeable future, but best I found with any stock was more like £500...

Given the x470 Gaming Max board is £30 cheaper than the Tomahawk, any reasons to go for/not to go for that board? I thought the x470s were a higher spec so surprised to see it cheaper?
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom